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Hitchhikers and Acts

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RIGHT NOW on KFJC, the best radio station in the universe, they’re playing the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show.

Later on in the show Ann Arbor will be reading from my Acts of the Apostles (look left for free download), and will continue to do so in weekly installments through August.

In case you’re not reading this entry RIGHT NOW, I think you’ll be able to download archived shows. Look for Ann Arbor’s UnBedtime Stories.

(Also, mind you, it’s also OK to buy printed copies for dollars money.)

Un-ironic

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The note just below this one, under the heading “The Ironies” juxtaposes mention of my travails due to a broken computer and the horrible tragedy, the horrendous crime, in London today. I did not mean to imply any equivalence between my troubles and those in London, and I meant no insult to the dead, wounded, or to those who love them, or to anyone affected.

Trusting that people of good will will understand that, I’m going to let stand the entry.

And as for you, dear reader, I hope you’ll stay safe today.

Sunday profundities

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I went to a wedding last Saturday. The bride (a native of North Carolina) and the groom (a long-time resident of Massachusetts) met in an online discussion group. I had met & had become friends with the groom through a different online group. Before and after the wedding, Dear Wife Betty and I stayed at the home of another friend, whom I also had met through an online discussion group. And at the wedding reception were other friends that I knew from Kuro5hin (or the K5 spinoff site HuSi). As a technoskeptic with strong technoparanoidish tendencies I find it odd that so many of my best friends are people that I met online, and I also note with raised eyebrow that the bride and groom, who were married in an ultra-traditional High Spook Episcopalian mass, are both introverted people. One is a fifty year old astrophysicist and the other is a thirty year old (former) instructor of English. It’s hard to imagine they would have found each other had it not been for teh Intarweb.

Some other time I will write about the notion of community as it relates to “online community.” I used to think that this subject was played out enough that there was little new to say about it. I’ve changed my mind about that, so Stay Tuned, as Harold says.

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in re: Mars Rover — John channels Gary

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This article about the discovery, debugging, and patch of a timing glitch on the Mars Pathfinder caught my fancy.

Its system architecture reminded me of the three-bus architecture of Masscomp “real time unix(TM)” machines, which I came to know intimately “back in the day” (84-86) as a side effect of writing the damn ‘theory of operations’ manuals for it. And anyway, as any of y’all as have read the first page of my Acts of the Apostles knows, I think the discovery-and-debugging of timing glitches is inherently interesting.

Outer space and spacecraft and actual hardware are Gary’s beat around Wetmachine, so here’s my respects, gov’nuh.

By the way, Google came up with an article on the Masscomp architecture but you need an ACM membership to read it so I’m not bothering with it, as my account has expired. If anybody has a Masscomp architecture diagram lying about, kindly post a link.

Rosa Barks and Samba M'Bodj

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Dear Wife tells me that our veternarian finally came out and told her she was offended by the name of our dog, whom she’s had as a patient for ten years. Our dog’s name is Rosa Barks. She’s a black lab, and her name is obviously an allusion to Rosa Parks the great American patriot and legendary prime mover in the Civil Rights movement. We named our little puppy Rosa Barks twelve years ago, saying, “she’s a very dignified black lady, and she can sit wherever she wants.”

Obviously we knew this name was a little provocative when we chose it. Some people find it offensive. Our vet is sure that Ms. Parks herself would be offended, and perhaps she would be, given her recent lawsuit against the musical group Outkast over their use of her name in a song title.

Rosa Parks is a great hero of me and my wife; in fact, a copy of the very photo of her that adorns the Wikipedia page has also adorned our living room wall for years. But that does not mean I think she’s a god whose name cannot be taken in vain. And I think “Rosa Barks” is a great name for our pet.

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Laszlo is Hiring

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The company I work for, Laszlo Systems, has an opening for a software engineer to work on our Rich Internet Application (open source) platform.

I’ve been at Laszlo for two years and I like it a lot. Not only that, and call me a crack-head dreamer if you want to (go ahead! call me that!), but I really think Laszlo is going to transform the web. If you’re a hot-shot programmer you might want to check this out.

My boss has the details on the job.

Slow News Day

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Wetmachine is a bit sclerotic of late (content wise). Maybe it just needs an emitic or whatchacallit, an enema. Or a little more science. In any event, here’s a link to some earlier work I did towards A General Theory of Everything.

Sample quote:

My theory will not account for the chemical or atomic or subatomic: that’s covered elsewhere (See: scientists). Nor will I deal with cosmic stuff, for that’s too big to be of concern to us. Astrophysicists are on some kind of trip, we’ll agree on that, but what it has to do with you and me and the price of dough nuts is a closed question. So that leaves us with the human scale, that where we live, us’ns, and that’s what my theory shall reconcile, just like Milton, only updated.

Maybe that will be enough to scare some of the other wetmachiners in to action. After all, there’s more where that came from.

The Meme meme

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“There’s no such thing as a meme. Pass it on.”

I don’t know when I first encountered the word “meme”; I suspect it was sometime around 1997. In any event I disliked it enough to lampoon it in a little thing called “Notes on the Source Code”, which I wrote during one frenzied all-nighter in the spring of 1998 (“notes” later morphed into the astonishing hallucination known as Cheap Complex Devices, the most brilliant book I ever wrote. But I digress.)

Suddenly “meme” was everywhere. It was like fractal redux, ten years later.

I didn’t like “meme” because I thought it added nothing to the perfectly serviceable word “idea” and was just a lot of newfangled pseudo pscientific poppycock. I’ve changed my mind since then, even to the extent that I see much human activity as the mere playing out of memes in meat substrate.

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Wetmachinery

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Wetmachine designer & webmaster Gary Gray and I met tonight to go over plans for tweaks to the site, coming Real Soon Now.

We have a couple of goals in mind. Firstly, we want to make “Tales of the Sausage Factory” and “Inventing the Future” more accessible to their readerships. So there will be separate RSS feeds for these series, and vectors into the archives by author/topic. There will be sign-ups for various Wetmachine mailing lists. It will be more obvious how to post comments and how to get in touch with the various Wetmachiners.

Below the fold: your chance to jump into the Gary-John brawl over the “feel” of the site.

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No on Gonzales

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Wetmachine is a technocentric place. We talk about, mostly, science and technology and their relation to society. My own particular hobbyhorse is unforseen side effects of technology, especially negative side effects. I guess you would say I’m a dystopian, happiest whenever some new technopolistic horror happens and I can say “See! See! I told you we never should have angered the gods by making fire!”

I don’t generally post political rants here. (I have a diary at daily Kos for that.)

But I’m going to add my puny voice to the chorus opposing Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, because there are limits, after all, to my perverse delight in seeing technophilia run amok. Gonzales truly is an Orwellian character, a minion of Older Sibling and a cog in the machine that is hell-bent on turning my beloved United States of America into a high-tech Ociania–replete with a prole-filled gulag and a worldwide secret army of faceless enforcers brought up on videogames and armed to the teeth with gizmos, gadgets and all the latest in mind-fuck technology.

A vote for Gonzales is a vote not only for torture and the debasement of a proud American tradition that began, literally, with George Washington. A vote for Gonzales is a vote for the gulag, an the corruption of our republic that inveitably goes with it.

No on Gonzales.